The Church, the Falling Away, and the Restoration

by J. W. Shepherd

Although the majority of German Protestant Churches remained in connection with the Lutheran Reformation, a German Reformed Church, which bore a moderately Calvinistic aspect, sprang up in several parts of Germany. In 1650 the Elector Frederick II, of the Palatine, embraced the reformed creed, and organized the church of his dominions according to reformed principles. By his authority the Heidelberg Catechism, which soon came to be regarded not only as a standard symbolical book of the German Reformed Church, but was highly esteemed throughout the reformed world, was written.

CHAPTER V.
THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND

To say that the Reformation in England was brought about by the desire of Henry VIII to be divorced from Catharine of Aragon is to ignore the well-established facts of history. No king, however despotic, could have forced on such a revolution unless there was much in the life of the people that reconciled them to the change, and evidence of this is abundant.

There was much that was called “heresy” in England long before Luther raised his voice against Catholicism in Germany. Wycliffe’s writings and translations of the Scriptures into English had a tremendous influence on the people in England and for many years the fires of martyrdom were kept burning in the mad endeavor to stop the spread of the “heresy,” and so great was the exasperation that forty years after the death of Wycliffe Romanists dug up his bones and burned them, and still the “heresy” spread. As I have already shown in a former article, the work of Tyndale, “who won a martyr’s crown,” had a wonderful influence over the English people.

In the Dictionary of National Biography, Dr. Rashdall says:

It is certain that the Reformation had virtually broken out in the secret Bible readings of the Cambridge reformers before either the trumpet call of Luther or the exigencies of Henry VIII’s personal and political position set men free once more to talk openly against the pope and the monks, and to teach a simpler and more spiritual gospel than the system against which Wycliffe had striven. (Wycliffe, Vol. 63, p. 218.)

The Parliaments showed themselves anti-clerical long before Henry threw off his allegiance to Rome; and Englishmen could find no better term of insult to throw at the Scots than to call them “Pope’s men.” These, and many other things that might be mentioned, indicate a certain preparedness in England for the Reformation, and that there was a strong national force behind Henry, when he at last decided to defy the Pope of Rome. The possibility of England breaking away from papal authority and erecting itself into a separate church under the archbishop of Canterbury had been thought probable before the divorce precipitated the quarrel between Henry and the pope.

Henry clung strenuously to the conception of papal supremacy, and advocated it in a manner only done hitherto by canonists of the Roman court. It is evident that the validity of his marriage and the legitimacy of his children by Catharine of Aragon depended on the pope being in possession of the very fullest powers of dispensation. Henry had been married to Catharine under very peculiar circumstances, which suggested doubts about the validity of the marriage ceremony.

To make the alliance stronger between England and Spain the pope had a marriage arranged between Arthur, Prince of Wales, and Catharine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The wedding took place in St. Paul’s, November 14, 1501, but Arthur died April 2, 1502, and it was proposed from the side of Spain that the young widow should marry Henry, her brother-in-law, now Prince of Wales. Ferdinand insisted that if this was not done Catharine should be sent back to Spain and her dowry returned. Pope Julius II was then besieged to grant a dispensation for the marriage. At first he refused to give his consent. Such a marriage had been branded as a sin by canonical law, and the pope himself had grave doubts whether it was competent for him to grant a dispensation in such a case; but he finally yielded to the pressure and granted the dispensation. The archbishop of Canterbury, who doubted whether the pope could grant dispensation for what was a mortal sin in his eyes, was silenced. The marriage took place June 11, 1509.

The first four children were either stillborn or died soon after birth; and it was rumored in Rome as early as 1514 that Henry might ask to be divorced in order to save England from a disputed succession. Mary was born in 1516 and survived, but all the children who came afterwards were either stillborn or died soon after birth. There is no doubt that the lack of a male heir troubled Henry greatly. There seems to be no reason for questioning the sincerity of his doubts about the legitimacy of his marriage with Catharine, or that he actually looked on the repeated destruction of his hopes of a male heir as a divine punishment for the sin of that contract. Questions of national policy and impulses of passion quickened marvelously his conscientious convictions. In the perplexities of his position the shortest way out seemed to be to ask the pope to declare that he had never been legally married to Catharine. He fully expected the pope to grant his request; but the pope was at the time practically in the power of Charles V, to whom his aunt, the injured Catharine, had appealed, and who had promised her his protection. From the protracted proceedings in the divorce case, Henry learned that he could not depend on the pope giving him what he wanted; and although his agents fought the case in Rome, he at once began preparing for the separation from papal jurisdiction. In the meantime, Henry had taken measures to summon a parliament; and in the interval between summons and assembly it had been suggested that Cranmer was of the opinion that the best way to deal with the divorce was to take it out of the hands of the pope and lay it before the canonists of the various universities of Europe. Through Cranmer this was so successfully done that the universities of England, France and Italy decided that the marriage was null and void. The king separated from Catharine, married Anne Boleyn, and fell under the papal ban.