[31] Lady Jane Grey, granddaughter and heiress of Charles and Mary.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION.
1536-1553.
The breach between England and Rome had become irreparable when Henry executed More and Fisher, and when Pope Paul had declared the king deposed. The Church of England had now seceded from the Roman obedience, and organized herself as an independent body with the sovereign as her Supreme Head. The secession had been carried out entirely on the king's initiative, but the nation had acquiesced in it because of the old and long-felt abuses of which the papacy had always been the maintainer. King and people alike wished to make an end of the customs by which the Pope had profited,—his vast gains from the annates of English sees and benefices; his habit of appointing non-resident Italians to the richest English preferments; his power of summoning litigants on ecclesiastical matters before the distant, costly, and corrupt Church courts at Rome. It was generally thought that when England freed herself from the Roman obedience, she would be able to reform in peace all the faults and abuses which disfigured her ecclesiastical system. Further than this the majority of the nation did not at first wish to go; they had not ceased to be Catholics, though they were no longer Roman Catholics. Only a comparatively small section of the English people had yet been affected by the later developments of Continental Protestantism.
German Protestantism.
But the conditions of the English and the Germans at the moment when both threw off the yoke of Rome, were sufficiently similar to make it inevitable that the theories of the Continental Reformers would ere long begin to act upon English minds. The German protest against the papacy had taken shape in the declaration that the Bible alone was the rule by which Christian men should order their lives—that the tradition of the mediaeval Church, which supplemented the teaching of the Gospels, was dangerous, full of errors and superstitions, and often directly opposed to scriptural precept. Mediaeval traditions were the bulwark of the Roman see, and ere long we find King Henry and his bishops following the Germans into this position, and basing the reform of the English Church on the Bible, and the Bible alone. But when tradition was rejected and the Scriptures taken as the sole test of all doctrines, further development became inevitable. There soon arose Reformers in England, as on the Continent, who could not find in their Bibles any justification for some of the doctrines to which King Henry clung most obstinately, and most of all for the dogma of Transubstantiation, round which the Roman Church had built up its main claim to rule the souls of men.
Doctrine of transubstantiation.
This doctrine concerning "the Sacrifice of the Mass," as commonly held at this time in the Western Church, taught that, at the celebration of the Holy Communion, when the priest had consecrated the sacramental bread and wine, the very flesh and blood of Christ became carnally and corporeally present in the chalice and patten—that the bread and wine were no longer bread and wine, but had been transubstantiated into Christ's own body, which was day by day offered up in sacrifice for the sins of the world. The Pope and the priesthood, by their power of granting or refusing the sacrament to the laity, stood as the sole mediators between God and man. The Continental Protestants, cut off from the main body of the Western Church by the Pope's ban, had formulated theories which struck at the roots of the power of the clergy. Many of them treated the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as no more than a solemn ceremony, denying any sacramental character to the rite. The majority of the early English Protestants fell into this extreme view.
Attitude of the king.