The Reformation in England and in Scotland.
In the progress of civilization, the middle of the sixteenth century may be taken as the turning point between the old past, with its feudalism, its authoritative church, its restricted culture, its antiquated science,—and the newer order of things from which has sprung the ever-expanding present. Since Guttenberg first used moveable types, a century had so far perfected his invention that books were becoming plentiful; and the one which is morally and socially, as well as religiously, the chief book in the world, had been translated into the mother-tongue of England. Towns were asserting their chartered privileges. The telescope was ransacking the heavens, and, for the first time, Magellan had circumnavigated the globe. Cannon were used in warfare, and iron had been smelted in England. The newspaper had been born; and Law was gradually gaining the ascendancy over disorder and old prerogative.
The Reformation of religion had established itself in Central and Northern Europe, and was now fighting its way in England and Scotland. But the battle with Papal authority and its dogmatic creeds was begun under very different circumstances, was carried on by very different methods, and had very different results in the two neighbouring countries.
How did the English Reformation come about? During nearly forty years in the first half of the sixteenth century (1509 to 1547) England was ruled by the last of her really despotic kings, Henry VIII. As everybody knows, Henry had a peculiar domestic experience,—he married in succession six wives. As fresh fancies took him, he rid himself of four of these—two by divorce, and two by the headsman’s axe. One wife, Jane Seymour, died in childbirth of his only son, who succeeded him as Edward VI. Wife No. 6, by her extraordinary prudence contrived to escape destruction, and survived the kingly monster. This is a harsh term for the historical father of the English church, and some modern historians of ability and repute have done their best—as has been done in the cases of Macbeth and Richard III., as these kings are portrayed by Shakespeare—to partially whitewash Henry. That he was, in common parlance, a great king, and a man of ability, of energy and decision, and that under him England prospered, and held an advanced position amongst the nations, few will dispute; but that he was a cruel, lustful, selfish tyrant seems equally undeniable. He made use of men and women as subservient to his will or his pleasure, and when his ends were so served, he ruthlessly destroyed them. His great minister, Wolsey, would not bend to his wishes in the matter of divorcing his first wife, so Wolsey was degraded, and in his old age sent into seclusion, to die of a broken heart. And in succession Thomas Cromwell, Sir Thomas More, and the Earl of Surrey, suffered the fate of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.
Henry, when a young man, opposed the Reformation. He wrote a book against Luther and his heresies, which so pleased the Pope that he granted Henry the title of Defender of the Faith. This papal title has passed down by inheritance through all succeeding English sovereigns; every coin from the mintage of Queen Victoria bears its initial letters.
Henry first married, under the Pope’s dispensation, the widow of his elder brother Arthur, Catherine of Arragon, by whom he had a daughter, afterwards Queen Mary. But the King fell in love—if, in the passions of such a man, the noble word love can be rightly used—with Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine’s lady attendants. To gain Anne, Henry, after a number of years of wedded life with Catherine, all at once became conscience-stricken that his marriage with her was an unlawful one; and he asked the Pope to recall his dispensation and annul the marriage. Now, Catherine was sister to the Emperor of Germany, Charles the Fifth, one of the Pope’s best supporters in these sad Reformation times. And, moreover, to have rescinded the dispensation would have been an admission of papal fallibility; so the Pope gave Henry a refusal.
Henry threw off his allegiance to the Pope, and had himself acknowledged by Parliament as the supreme head of the English Church. Powerful, unscrupulous, and popular, he confiscated church revenues, broke up monasteries, and by Act of Parliament, in 1537, completed politically the English Reformation. It was, so far as the King was concerned, a reformation only in name, for as to liberty of conscience, and the right of private judgment, he was as arrogant a bigot as any pope who ever wore the tiara. He vacillated in his own opinions, but enforced those he held at the time by such severe enactments, that many persons of both religions were burned as heretics.
And from the Anglican Church, so founded on despotism and intolerance, can we wonder that the shadow of Rome has never been thoroughly lifted? In the abstract it is essentially a close corporation of ecclesiastics, the mere people hardly counting as a necessary factor. Its sacraments have still miraculous or supernatural properties attached to them; no one must officiate therein who has not been ordained, and the assumed powers of ordination came through the Romish Church. From the older Church it adopted certain creeds, as dogmatic in their assertions, and intolerant in their fulminations, as were ever Papal Bulls or Decrees of Councils. Of course the mellowing influence of time, the broadening thoughts of later years, and the rivalship of Nonconformity, have done much to take out old stings and deaden old intolerance; whilst a cloud of witnesses for righteousness and progress in the Church itself, have raised it above its old self, and brought it in nearer touch with the spirit of the present age.