The Lutherans.
To the third or Lutheran party, belonged Cranmer, Latimer, Barnes, Shaxton, Crome, Hilsey, Jerome, Barlow, all the government Reformers of position and authority, adhering to the real presence, and, in a general sense, to the sacraments, but melting them away in the interpretation. The true creed of these men was spiritual, not mechanical. They abhorred idolatry, images, pilgrimages, ceremonies, with a Puritan fervour. They followed Luther in the belief in justification by faith, they rejected masses, they did not receive the sacerdotal system, they doubted purgatory, they desired that the clergy should be allowed to marry, they differed from the Protestants in the single but vital doctrine of transubstantiation. This party after a few years ceased to exist, developing gradually from the type of Wittenberg to that of Geneva.
The Protestants proper.
Lastly, and still confounded in a common mass of abomination, lay Zuinglians, Anabaptists, sacramentarians, outcasts disowned and cursed by all the rest as a stigma and reproach; those whose hearts were in the matter, who supplied the heat which had melted the crust of habit, and had made the Reformation possible.
The creed of Cromwell.
The creed of the king.
Parties in the Privy Council.
For the present the struggle in the state lay between the Anglicans and the Lutherans—the king and Cromwell lying again between them. Cromwell, on the whole orthodox in matters of speculation, cared, nevertheless, little for such matters; his true creed was a hatred of charlatans, and of the system which nursed and gave them power; and his sympathy was gradually bursting the bounds of a tradition which continued to hamper him. The king was constant to his place of mediator; he insisted on the sacraments, yet he abhorred the magical aspect of them. He differed from the Anglican in his zeal for the dissemination of the Bible, in his detestation of the frauds, impostures, profligacies, idlenesses, ignorances, which had disgraced equally the secular and regular clergy, and in his fixed English resolution never more to tolerate the authority of the Pope. He differed from the Lutherans, and thus more and more from Cromwell, in his dislike of theoretic novelties, in an inability to clear himself from attaching a special character to the priesthood, in an adherence generally to the historical faith, and an anxiety to save himself and the country from the reproach of apostacy. A sharp line divided the Privy Council. Cranmer headed the Reformers, supported by the late-created peers, Cromwell, Lord Russell, and for a time Lord Southampton and the lord chancellor; opposed to these were the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, Sir Anthony Brown, Gardiner, Bonner who was now Bishop of London, the Bishops of Durham, Chichester, and Lincoln; and the two parties regarded each other across the board with ever deepening hatred, with eyes watching for any slip which might betray their antagonists to the powers of the law, and were only prevented by the king’s will from flying into open opposition.
The confidence of the middle classes in the king.
In the country, the sympathy of the middle classes was, for the most part, with Henry in preference to either Cranmer or Gardiner, Norfolk or Cromwell. Even in the Pilgrimage of Grace the king had been distinguished from his advisers. A general approbation of the revolt from a foreign usurpation led the body of the nation to support him cordially against the Pope; and therefore, as long as there was danger from Paul or Paul’s friends, in England or out of it, Cromwell remained in power as the chief instrument by which the Papal domination had been overthrown. But there was an understanding felt, if not avowed, both by sovereign and subjects, that even loyalty had its limits. If it were true—as the king had ever assured them that it was not true—that Cromwell was not only maintaining English independence and reforming practical abuses, but encouraging the dreaded and hated “heresy,” then indeed their duties and their conduct might assume another aspect.