[BOOK IV.]
THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND
CHAPTER I.
THE CHURCH OF HENRY VIII.[364]
The Church and people of England broke away from the mediæval papal ecclesiastical system in a manner so exceptional, that the rupture had not very much in common with the contemporary movements in France and Germany. Henry VIII. destroyed the papal supremacy, spiritual and temporal, within the land which he governed; he cut the bands which united the Church of England with the great Western Church ruled over by the Bishop of Rome; he built up what may be called a kingly papacy on the ruins of the jurisdiction of the Pope. His starting-point was a quarrel with the Pope, who refused to divorce him from Catharine of Aragon.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Henry’s eagerness to be divorced from Catharine accounts for the English Reformation. 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 abundantly forthcoming.
There was a good deal of heresy, so called, in England long before Luther’s voice had been heard in Germany. Men maintained that the tithes were exactions of covetous priests, and were not sanctioned by the law of God; they protested against the hierarchical constitution of the mediæval Church; they read the Scriptures, and attended services in the vernacular; and they scoffed at the authority of the Church and attacked some of its doctrines. Lollardy had never died out in England, and Lollardy was simply the English form of that passive protest against the mediæval Church which under various names had maintained itself in France, Germany, and Bohemia for centuries in spite of persecution. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments show that there was a fairly active repression of so-called heresy in England before Luther’s days, and his accounts are confirmed by the State Papers of the period. In 1511, Andreas Ammonius, the Latin secretary of Henry VIII., writing to Erasmus, says that wood has grown scarce and dear because so much was needed to burn heretics, “and yet their numbers grow.” Yet Dr. James Gairdner declares that only a solitary pair had suffered during that year at the stake![365] Early in 1512 the Archbishop of Canterbury summoned a meeting of convocation for the express purpose of arresting the spread of heresy;[366] in that same year Erasmus was told by More that the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum were popular everywhere throughout England;[367] and a commission was given to the Bishop of Coventry and others to inquire about Lollards in Wales and other parts;[368] and as late as 1521 the Bishop of London arrested five hundred Lollards.[369] In 1530, Henry VIII. himself, always curious about theology and anxious to know about the books which interested his subjects, sent to Oxford for a copy of the Articles on which Wiclif had been condemned.[370] Anyone who scoffed at relics or pilgrimages was thought to be a Wiclifite.[371] In 1531, divinity students were required to take an oath to renounce the doctrines of Wiclif, Hus, and Luther;[372] and in 1533, More, writing to Erasmus, calls Tyndale and his sympathisers Wiclifites.[373] Henry VIII. was engaged as early as 1518 in composing a book against heresy and vindicating the claims of the Roman See, which in its first inception could scarcely be directed against Luther, and probably dealt with the views of home heretics.[374] Some modern historians are inclined to find a strong English revolt against Rome native to the soil and borrowing little or nothing from Luther, which they believe to have been the initial force at work in shaping the English Reformation. Mr. Pollard points out that in many particulars this Reformation followed the lines laid down by Wiclif. Its leaders, like Wiclif, denounced the Papal Supremacy on the ground of the political injury it did to the English people; declaimed against the sloth, immorality, and wealth of the English ecclesiastics; advocated a preaching ministry; and looked to the secular power to restrain the vices and reform the manners of the clergy, and to govern the Church. He shows that
“most of the English Reformers were acquainted with Wycliffe’s works: Cranmer declares that he set forth the truth of the Gospel; Hooper recalls how he resisted ‘the popish doctrine of the Mass’; Ridley, how he denied transubstantiation; and Bale, how he denounced the friars.... Bale records with triumph that, in spite of the efforts to suppress (the writings of Wicliffe), not one had utterly perished.”[375]