Sketch of the Reformation in England

by John J. Blunt

We have now touched upon a few of the many elements which were secretly at work preparing England for a reformation of religion, and without some regard to which it would be impossible to account for the rapid pace at which it was consummated: let us but shut our eyes to this undercurrent of events—take our stand at the accession of Henry the Eighth—and endeavour to guess at the future; and what could seem to us more improbable, than that a reign so begun was destined to effect the extinction of the papal power in England? Henry mounted the throne with a treasury full to overflowing, the fruits of a revenue improved by the wisdom of his father’s laws, by the care with which that sagacious monarch husbanded the nation’s purse, and, it must be added, by the rapacity of Dudley and Empson, his fiscal officers; who then would conjecture that an exhausted exchequer was to drive him to the plunder of the church, in order to continue the profusion which its affluence had taught him?—He had mounted the throne a zealous papist and a learned, having been himself intended, it was said, for the see of Canterbury, had not the death of his elder brother put the crown upon his head instead of the mitre; ambitious, moreover, of papal distinctions, and eventually able to procure them by entering the lists with Luther as a volunteer champion of the ancient creed; who would then conjecture that the title of “Defender of the Faith,” in the sense in which it was conferred upon him, was the very last to which he was to have a just claim?—He mounted the throne, having Katherine, his brother’s widow, for his wife by a dispensation from the Pope, who counted it the ratification of his own authority in England, that her very princes were thenceforth to derive their title to the crown from the validity of this his bull; who then would conjecture that this stroke of policy, as it was thought, for which a point had been strained at Rome, was to be precisely the ruin of the politician, and that the subversion of papal usurpation in England would be actually effected by the very measure which was to have confirmed it? Amongst the distinctive marks by which God’s hand may be perceived regulating human affairs, this, says Barrow, in his noble sermon on a special Providence,[217] is one—“the wonderful strangeness of events compared with the ordinary course of things, or the natural influence of causes: when effects are performed by no visible means, or by means disproportionate, unsuitable, repugnant to the effect:”—and surely, when tried by such a criterion, nothing can furnish stronger evidence of a work which “was not of man but of God,” than the events which immediately preceded the Reformation, and the consequences which flowed from them. It might seem that a question concerning the king’s marriage was the most unlikely thing in the world to set this great cause in motion—yet such was the fact.—Henry, after living nearly twenty years with Katherine, felt, or affected to feel, scruples as to the lawfulness of marrying a brother’s widow. Whether the exception which was taken against the legitimacy of the Princess Mary by the French ambassador when the marriage between her and the Duke of Orleans came under discussion, was honestly made and did in reality open Henry’s eyes to a new view of his own position—whether Wolsey started the objections which unsettled the King’s mind, with the intention of serving his own ends by thwarting the Emperor the Queen’s nephew, and providing the King with a match more agreeable to himself—whether the death of the Queen’s untimely offspring with a single exception, did as he pretended, fill him with concern as the accomplishment of the Levitical law, “that if a man take his brother’s wife it is an unclean thing; they shall be childless;”[218]—or whether, on the other hand, he was weary of a wife whose ascetic devotions might seem to fit her more for a convent than a court, whilst her person, not attractive at best, was now rendered less so by increasing infirmities;—or, lastly, whether the charms of Ann Bullen had conjured up in him his strong sense of the sin he had committed in uniting himself with Katherine, as may be imagined without any great breach of charity of a man, whose conscience, upon other occasions, besides this, seems to have been singularly ill-timed in its suggestions—so it was, that a divorce was determined upon, and measures were adopted to carry the determination into effect. Opinions were divided; the sexes in general took opposite sides; but the learned themselves were not agreed—on the one hand, it was argued that the prohibition of such a marriage was clear in the Levitical law,[219] and such prohibition was not to be considered as confined to the Jews, for that the violation of it is expressly numbered among the sins of the Canaanites by which the land was polluted,[220] and therefore that it was of universal obligation; moreover, that John the Baptist declared of Herod, that it was “not lawful for him to have his brother’s wife;” that John, therefore, held the law of Moses upon this point to be still binding;[221]—that in the same manner St. Paul condemned the Corinthian convert of a fornication not so much as named among the Gentiles, “in that he had his father’s wife;”[222] which like the other was one of the degrees forbidden in Leviticus, and forbidden in the very same chapter of Leviticus as the relation in question;[223]—that St. Paul, therefore, pronounced the Mosaical law, in these particulars, still to stand good.

On the other side, it was replied, that the Levitical precept must be understood, of not taking a brother’s wife whilst he was living, for that the brother was actually enjoined to take the brother’s widow, he having died childless and to raise up seed unto his brother;[224]—that with regard to Herod, he was guilty in the case of Herodias, not of incest but of adultery—Philip, as seems probable from Josephus, being yet alive;—that the like must be said of the Corinthian delinquent, “fornication not to be named among the Gentiles,” implying that the offence was committed in his father’s lifetime, since, otherwise the connection, however monstrous, was not unknown among the Persians, and that even amongst the Jews Adonijah had desired Abishag in marriage.[225]

To this it was rejoined,—that the exception in the general law proved only that God might dispense with his own ordinances for his own ends, and that the end in this case was, the preservation of a family in Israel, and care for the protection of the genealogy of the future Messiah, objects now accomplished, and the means thereto now superseded;—that in Herod’s affair, it cannot be with certainty affirmed that when he married Herodias, Philip was living, that she certainly deserted her former husband, but that she was probably divorced from him; and that for aught which appears to the contrary, Josephus who condemns her conduct as an infraction of the law, understands, when he does so, her marriage with her husband’s brother, he not having left her childless;[226]—that the case of the Corinthian does not admit of the interpretation that he took his father’s wife before his father’s death, for that the seventh commandment alone was provision enough against such an abuse, and that the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus, in which this and similar abominations are forbidden, and to which St. Paul has here an eye, must have contemplated something distinct from adultery, and does in fact contemplate the case of incestuous alliance.

Much more was said. But the question was not debated upon scriptural grounds only. The fathers, the schoolmen, and the Pope’s decretals were all brought into the controversy, and a case under no circumstances very simple became immeasurably complicated. It was at this period, about the year 1529, that the King being upon a journey, chanced to pass a night at Waltham-Cross; on this occasion it fell to the lot of two of his servants, to sleep at the house of one Mr. Cressy, of Waltham, where the conversation at the supper-table happened to turn upon the great topic of the day—the royal divorce. Of the party, was a fellow of Jesus’ College, Cambridge, whom the plague had driven from the University, and who had taken up his quarters meanwhile at Mr. Cressy’s house, being a relation of his wife, and the tutor of his children; his opinion was asked, he being a learned academician,—it went to this, that the question was one concerning the meaning of Scripture and nothing else; and that of this, men of learning, and the Universities more especially, would be the fittest judges; for “that the Bishop of Rome had no such authority as whereby he might dispense with the word of God.” Here were some great principles involved; Scripture set up as the rule of action; the interpretation of it asserted to be matter of private right; and the Pope himself declared not to be above it. The sentiment was reported to the King, already wearied with his “infinite cause,” as he called it; and the author of it, much against his own will, was sent for to court—it was Cranmer.

“How far God fetches his purposes about!” is the contemplation of Bishop Hall on the manner of Saul’s call to the kingly office. “The asses of Kish, Saul’s father, are strayed away; what is that to the news of a kingdom? But God lays these small accidents for the ground of greater designs.”[227] The sickness at Cambridge, the moment at which it occurred, the trifle which determined Waltham above all places for the retreat of Cranmer, the casual sojourn of the king there for a single night, the house of all the houses to which his secretary and almoner were directed for their evening’s lodging, and the subject-matter of the conversation, incidents, most of them inconsiderable in themselves, and independent of one another, yet all conspiring to call out of obscurity probably the fittest, perhaps the only fit man in the whole kingdom, for superintending ecclesiastical affairs at a crisis so peculiar—this is altogether a combination of circumstances, which it may be philosophy to call a chapter of accidents, but which it is not superstition to ascribe to the finger of “a God that governs the earth.” With so splendid an instance before our eyes, that opinion can scarcely be treated with disrespect, which holds the call to the ministry to be in some degree, though certainly in a subordinate degree, external; to be the voice of events which have been so ordered as to guide the party to his novitiate, and to land him at last in the priestly office. But this by the way. Cranmer had been a hard student, and in the subjects of his study had kept pace with the times in which he lived. He began, where most scholars in those days ended, with Duns Scotus and the subtle doctors, a discipline which had at least the merit of making astute disputants; and, as Bishop Berkeley said of academical learning in general, might serve even when forgotten, like a crop when ploughed under, to improve and enrich the soil.[228] Escaped from the schools, he betook himself to the writings of Erasmus, for whom he seems ever to have entertained a strong personal regard, perhaps as being the author who first opened his eyes. Luther absorbed him in his turn; and now the controversy between that reformer and his opponents being serious, agitating matters no less than the fundamentals of the Christian faith (agitur de vita et sanguine), the appeal moreover being made to Scripture alone, Cranmer set himself resolutely to the examination of the word of God, that he might qualify himself for exercising a sound judgment on these high arguments; and of the patience, the learning, the discrimination, with which he did this, the Liturgy of our church (were there no other) would be an everlasting monument, in which, whoever will be at the pains of taking a prayer or a clause to pieces, will find occasion to wonder at the masterly knowledge of the Bible which the selection even of some single expression often betrays, so that having pursued happily, as he thinks, some intricate point of theology through windings manifold, and having arrived at a conclusion which he almost fancies his very own, he will be surprised to find that our reformer has been beforehand with him even in this, and has given some unobtrusive indication of his being in possession of the secret by a word in season dropped out of his abundance as he passes on his way.

Such was the man whom the accidents we have recounted introduced to King Henry. Henry commanded him to digest in writing the substance of what he had uttered on the question of the divorce, and committed him to the hospitality of the Earl of Wiltshire, the most accomplished nobleman of the day, the father of Ann Bullen, where that friendship was formed between the future archbishop and the future queen, which still further promoted the cause of the Reformation, and disposed the latter to be in heart, as well as in principle, a nursing mother to the infant church.

Meanwhile the King’s cause, which had been submitted in an early stage of it to the Pope’s decision, had made small progress. Cardinal Campejus had been united in a commission with Wolsey to try it in England, but there was no serious intention of ever giving judgment. Whatever hand Wolsey might have had in stirring the question at first, he soon found that he should not be able to substitute for Katharine a queen of his own; and though not a cordial churchman, nor caring about giving offence to churchmen, nor very nice upon the sin of sacrilege (for his example was afterwards quoted in the dissolution of the abbeys), still he was not desirous of exchanging even the most rigorous Romanist for a Lutheran, and he therefore was lukewarm in the prosecution of the suit. His colleague had his private instructions and private interests too. The affair was embarrassing to the Pope: he could not decide without exasperating an Emperor of Germany or a King of England, and he seems to have halted between the two, hoping perhaps that some propitious accident of death or disaster might intervene to release him from his unpleasant dilemma. Accordingly, the judgment of the commissioners is expected from day to day; the court meets, deliberates, examines witnesses, and determines nothing. It was for the credit of the King that matters should not seem to be done in heat or haste. The Queen was to be cited; on her non-appearance, to be pronounced contumacious; a fresh citation to be issued; a reservation to be made of some collateral question for the Pope’s own decision; the sittings of the court to follow the rules of the Consistory of Rome, of which it was but a branch, and the cause to be suspended during the vacations at Rome; finally, the commission was to be closed, and the whole process to be transferred to the hearing of the Pontiff himself, and the King and Queen to appear before him in person or by proxy. But this last was an alternative to which the King had too high a stomach to submit, who pleaded the prerogative of his crown, which did not allow of being subjected to foreign jurisdiction, and the liberties of his people, which demanded that questions of marriage should be tried at home and by their own church.[229] Thus passed away six long years in fruitless negotiations, till Henry, having now secured the opinion of nearly all the universities at home and abroad in his favour, a measure which Cranmer, whom he had sent upon the Continent as his champion for this purpose, had been very instrumental in accomplishing, as well as the verdict of the most distinguished individuals amongst the divines and scholars of Europe, gave proof that the “strong blood” of the Plantagenets was in his veins, took the law into his own hands, married Ann Bullen probably on the 14th November, 1532, and set the Pope at defiance.

On reviewing the question of the divorce (as by a misnomer it has been called), there can be little doubt, we suppose, that the marriage was in the first instance unlawful. The authorities which declared it so preponderated at the time of the discussion; many, and amongst others Archbishop Warham, had protested against the match when it was originally proposed; and when the canon of prohibited degrees was afterwards adjusted by Archbishop Parker, it was expressly determined that a man may not marry his brother’s wife. If, therefore, the conduct of Henry had been such in other respects as to give token of a scrupulous conscience, it might have been credited that in this instance he was sincere in his professions of uneasiness; and that believing Katharine and himself to be joined together otherwise than God’s word doth allow, he sought for relief in the dissolution of the contract. But that contract was entered into with deliberation; it was made when the King was a minor—it was repeated and ratified when he was of just age; the objections, whatever they were, were not new; they had been raised and over-ruled, when Katharine was to be the bride, when she had youth to plead for her, and a dower of unparalleled magnitude, the first fruits of the trans-Atlantic treasures of Spain: it was only when these advocates were no more, her blossom faded, and her golden fruit gathered and gone, that the objections (valid in themselves) became fatal. Her lot in life was indeed hard; but her grave at least has been strewed with immortal flowers; and “the meek sorrows and virtuous distress of Katharine have furnished some scenes (says no mean critic) which may be justly reckoned amongst the greatest efforts of tragedy.”

And now, Archbishop Warham being sick unto death, the King intimates to Cranmer, who was engaged in his service on the Continent, his intention of promoting him to the primacy. There are some men who seek honours, and some who have honours thrust upon them: Cranmer belonged to the latter class; he was not prepared for so great and sudden an elevation. Under pretence that the King’s affairs still required his presence abroad, he tarried six months longer, in the hope that Henry might consign the crosier to some other hand.[230] There was no affectation in this—no fuga ad salices. Ambition is made of sterner stuff than the spirit of Cranmer. Even at an age when such a passion, if ever, must have been most active, and when he was as yet without a patron, he, like Parker, declined the offer of a fellowship in cardinal Wolsey’s college at Oxford, preferring the society of his old friends, or fellow-students, to the more splendid prospects which, a connection with the great favourite of the day presented; and even risking his displeasure rather than do violence to his own early associations, and bid adieu to the scenes of his boyhood and his youth. Neither was it of his own good will that he was in the first instance brought under the King’s notice, by the question of the divorce;—on the contrary, he quarrelled with his friends who had thus disturbed his repose, pleaded that it was a matter on which he had bestowed no pains or study, and begged in vain that he might be excused the honour of being closeted with a king.[231] Nor, indeed, were the times such as promised the head which wore the mitre an office of ease. Likely it was to prove but “a glistering grief,”—“a golden sorrow,” to the wearer; and it wanted no great sagacity to foresee (what the King told Cranmer when he afterwards changed his arms) that the pelican was fitter for his crest than the crane: seeing that “he would one day have to shed his blood for his young ones, if he stood to his tackling.”[232] But there was yet another and a stronger reason for Cranmer holding back;—the scruples he entertained touching the oath of fidelity to the Pope, which was exacted of an archbishop at his presentation. As yet the supremacy of the Pope was acknowledged; and though the subject had been mooted two years before, and even the title of supreme head of the church and clergy of England had been ascribed to Henry by the convocation under Archbishop Warham, in 1530, it was reluctantly, and was not immediately followed up. Here, therefore, Cranmer was embarrassed. The oath, however, he took under a previous public[233] protestation, “that he did not admit the Pope’s authority any further than it agreed with the express word of God; and that it might be lawful for him at all times to speak against him, and to impugn his errors when there should be occasion.”[234] The honesty of this proceeding has been often made the subject of debate; and it must be acknowledged that it presents some symptoms of a mind yet scarcely escaped from the dangerous casuistry of the Roman Catholic doctors;—some touch of that jesuitical spirit which is so effectually exposed in the letters of Pascal; and against the insidious approaches of which even the native integrity of the single-hearted Cranmer was not altogether proof. In this instance, as in the instance of Sir T. More’s persecutions, and indeed of his own, it was a corrupted and corrupting creed that was in fault, rather than an evil heart or evil eye in the individuals themselves. Still many circumstances may be pleaded in extenuation of Cranmer’s conduct. He did not take the Pope by surprise; the name, the writings, and the person of Cranmer, were familiar to him; Cranmer had openly contended against his dispensing power in the case of the divorce both in Germany, and at Rome itself, nearly three years before; so that even had no protest been made on his part, the Pope must have been aware of the character and opinions of the man; and if he admitted him to the primacy, he must have been conscious that he did it at his peril. The truth was, the pope had no choice, and he felt that he had none: doubtless he would have been too glad to reject the King’s candidate and to substitute for him a creature of his own; but he knew with whom he had to deal in Henry, not with a tame monarch, and with what he had to deal in England, no longer with a tame people. He knew that the very point at issue, the necessity of his bull at all to legalise the appointment to the see of Canterbury, was even then disputed, and that to withhold it under such circumstances would be merely to hasten the crisis which he had too much reason to think was in any case at hand, the loss of his supremacy. The event proved this. He did not refuse the bull, (not that he was aware of Cranmer’s protest at the time; but of Cranmer’s character, which was equivalent to it, he was perfectly aware,) and accordingly he staved off the evil that menaced him for one year more, but it was only for one year. This was the last bull he sent into England during the reign of Henry; and had that capricious prince listened to the advice and entreaty of Cranmer, application would not have been made even for this,[235] and then Henry would have been sooner spared the dishonour of subjecting his bishops to a dilemma by which perjury to the Pope or to the King could scarcely be escaped, and Cranmer would have been spared the equivocation by which he laboured to reconcile oaths which were irreconcilable. Here, after all, was the grievance, and on those who exacted them was, in a great measure, the guilt. Nothing less was required of a bishop than to swear allegiance to two masters, who had no two interests in common:—to the Pope; that he would, from that hour forward, be faithful and obedient to St. Peter and to the holy church of Rome, to my Lord the Pope and his successors; that they should suffer no wrong by any means with his advice, consent, or connivance, that their counsel he would not discover, their regality he would help, maintain and defend, against all men; their rights, honours, privileges, authorities, he would augment and promote; and any designs against the same, which came to his knowledge, he would resist and denounce:—to the King, that he would thenceforward utterly forsake all clauses, words, sentences, grants which he had or should have hereafter from the Pope’s Holiness in virtue of his bishopric that in any wise were or might be prejudicial to his Highness, his heirs, successors, dignity, privilege, or estate royal; that to him and his he would be faithful and true, and live and die with him against all people; that he acknowledged himself to hold his bishopric of him only, and accordingly besought of him the restitution of the temporalities of the same.[236] Now to be impaled on one or other of the horns of such an alternative as this was a cruel situation into which no man ought to have been forced; and though it is an easy thing for an indifferent spectator at a distance to philosophise upon the unseemly writhings of the victim, yet some allowance will be made for him by every pitiful-hearted observer if, in his struggles to get off the hook, he should chance to uncover his nakedness. The question indeed, resolved itself into this; were there, or were there not, to be bishops in England? for if none would take the oaths who could not acquiesce in both of them to the letter, and if none were to be admitted to consecration who refused either of the oaths, the order of prelates was at an end.[237]

On the 30th March, 1533, Cranmer was consecrated by the Bishops of Lincoln, Exeter, and St. Asaph; and in the May following (the convocation having declared the King’s marriage with Katharine unlawful) he publicly pronounced the sentence of their separation; and about the same time confirmed by another judgment, the match with Ann Bullen. Thus was he now fairly embarked in the same boat with the King, and the part he took in the transactions of these days was faithfully treasured up in the memory of Mary, and served at length (though not in the scriptural sense of the expression) to heap coals of fire upon his head. But however important such measures were in fact, they were doubly so in principle. The Pope had joined a King and Queen together as lawful man and wife; his right to do this is not only disputed, but denied; and the church of England, assuming an attitude of independence, rescinds his decision, and sets his authority at nought. This could not be passed over. Rome threatens the King with excommunication; and as the last ounce it is that breaks the camel’s back, so here the menace proved enough to try the question of papal claims upon England, and to effect the rejection of them for ever.