A Chosen People? The English Church and the Reformation

In 1555, with catholic Mary on the throne, the leading cadres of the English Reformation found themselves eclipsed and in German exile. Hearing that some of their countrymen had succeeded in establishing a church of their own at Frankfortam-Main, and as men accustomed to command, these bishops and future bishops moved in on the Frankfort experiment and attempted to take charge of it as legatees of the official, Edwardian Church, symbolised by Archbishop Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, which they called 'the Book of England'. When they proceeded to 'do as they had done in England' and to use the Prayer Book responses in public worship they were rebuked by the elders of the congregation, to whom Dr Richard Cox, later to be bishop of Ely, declared that 'their Church should have an English face'; to which an ex-galley slave called John Knox retorted: 'The Lord grant it to have the face of Christ's Church!'

Here in a nutshell we have the whole contentious issue of nationalism and internationalism (or ecumenicity) in the English Reformation and the Tudor Church: contentious for contemporaries, contentious for historians. Did Henry VIII 'nationalise' the Church, so creating a new animal called 'the Church of England'? If so, this was the most notable single achievement of the Tudors, eclipsing in importance any 'Tudor Revolution in Government': although Professor Elton regards it as part of that constitutional and administrative transformation. And did that national Church and the Protestant religion it came to profess act as a vehicle and expression of a new patriotism? Was it the base for a species of English nationalism which would later develop into British imperialism?

These are large questions and they cannot be answered without many qualifications and prevarications. John Knox, who deplored Bishop Cox's narrow English chauvinism, left Frankfort and later Geneva to lead, insofar as any single person led, a religious and patriotic revolution in his native Scotland. If, according to Napoleon, a Frenchman is a Catholic whether he likes it or not, the modern Scottish nation has been, almost of necessity, a Calvinist, Presbyterian nation, represented politically not in a Parliament but in the General Assembly of its Reformed Church, which was born in the revolutionary year of 1560. So, like Moses in respect of Israel, Knox the prophet was the father of his people, 'the light of Scotland'. But England was spared a Knox and the English case was different in many respects. Writing a book against Knox, John Aylmer, another future bishop, declared: 'God is English!' But this was wartime rhetoric and the enemy was the old enemy, the French. Later a Member of Parliament reported that the French army had fled from the field at Berwick shouting that it was useless to resist. God had declared himself to be mere English. 'The living God is only the English God', exclaimed Lyly in Euphues and his England (1580).

But these slogans were far from a considered claim that the English Church was the only true Church, or that England had a special and exclusive destiny in God's sight. Such claims have been made from time to time by Christian nations, notably Ethiopia, whose people have believed themselves to be the true Beni-Israel, the only heirs of the promises. As students of American history know, it is one thing to regard yourself as an elect nation, as any devout 'nation under God' may feel constrained to do, quite another to boast of being the Elect Nation in an exclusive sense.

One of those who at Frankfort believed in doing as he had done in England was Bishop John Jewel. Yet when Jewel came to defend the newly reprotestantised Elizabethan Church against its Catholic detractors, he wrote in the name neither of an insular and national Church which had declared UDI against the rest of Christendom, nor of a newly invented religion (for what could be more damaging and insulting than to charge a religion with novelty?) but on behalf of a faith which was ecumenical and as old as the Apostles themselves. His Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562), although translated as An apologie or aunswer in defence of the Church of England is better described as an Apology of the Church of England for that same ancient, universal and truly Catholic faith against 'this late upstart religion of Rome'. Jewel declared an equal interest in 'what is done both in Germany and in England.' Discussing the burning of Michael Servetus in protestant Geneva and the execution of another 'anabaptist' heretic, he wrote: 'We burned them.' Jewel burned no one. 'We' meant the whole community of reformed churches, the 'best reformed churches' according to some of the most ardent of Elizabethan Protestants who were more impressed with foreign models than with their own, still imperfectly reformed Church.

Not until the time of Archbishop Laud – and this was Laud's capital offence in a religious perspective – did any prominent English churchman doubt that his Church professed the same faith and shared the same interests as other, continental Protestant churches, and sank or swam with them. At the time of the Dutch Revolt or in the darkest moments of the Thirty Years War, Protestant zeal looked outwards and served as a corrective to a narrow English parochialism. Protestantism might serve the cause of a kind of imperialism. But isolationism, which is also rooted in self-regard, was not a product of the English Reformation. As Jenny Wormald has recently demonstrated, those atavistic conspirators who attempted the atrocity of the Gunpowder Plot were in their own eyes true patriots as well as Catholics.

The problem gains in complexity if we extend it in time, and backwards. Medievalists will tell us that Ecclesia Anglicana was not an invention of the Reformation Parliament of Henry VIII but a time-honoured expression, indicating something more distinctive and personal than the two detached metropolitan provinces of a universal Church to which an excessively Roman Catholic perspective might seem to reduce English Christianity. Canterbury and York might quarrel over precedence, but it would be absurd to suggest that York had no more in common with Canterbury than it had with Mainz or Milan.

For centuries 'the liberties of the English Church' had meant something, whether they were asserted against the Crown, as in Magna Carta, or against a Pope, as in the fourteenth-century statutes of Provisors and Praemunire. Delegates to the Council of Constance knew that they went as Englishmen (in the year which otherwise saw the Battle of Agincourt!), just as medieval university students adhered to their nations, or pressed their claims to be regarded as a nation. Resistance by the French to the pretentions of the English nation at Constance was met with 'whistling', uproar and even the exchange of blows. In a formal protest, the English complained of these unwarranted attacks on 'the famous and undoubted English nation, also known as the British nation'. There are, said Bishop Thomas Polton, seven principal churches in Christendom. (The idea must have come from the seven churches of Asia, in the Book of Revelation.) Of these, the fourth in ranking order was the English Church.

If nationality was far from suppressed by the universality of the pre-Reformation Church, the post-Reformation dispensation was not without a continuing and, for some purposes, meaningful and practical sense of its place in a wider scheme of things. The first Edwardian Book of Common Prayer of 1549 made this point by describing itself as a book of rites and ceremonies 'of the Church after the use of the Church of England'. Subsequent recensions of the Prayer Book, from 1552 onwards, abandoned this concept and preferred the simpler formula of 'rites and ceremonies in the Church of England'. but not, it should be noted, of the Church of England, while 'Church of England' was always rendered in Latin as 'Ecclesia Anglicana', which, as we have seen, was an ancient style.

Very few Protestant Englishmen travelling abroad hesitated to communicate in the rites and ceremonies of other reformed churches. In a letter of advice to the preacher to the English merchants in Antwerp, Bishop Edmund Grindal of London recommended, in effect, that in Rome they should do as the Romans do. 'Place the table as theirs is. If they receive the sacrament standing, kneeling or sitting, do you the like', 'they' being the local Flemish Protestants. And this was one of those who at Frankfort had spoken of the face of an English Church! In the time of Edward it was natural for the archbishop of Canterbury to invite an Alsatian (Martin Bucer), an Italian (Peter Martyr Vermigli) and a Pole (Jan Laski) to preside as technical experts over the reform of the English Church.

In the reign of James I a delegation of English churchmen took part in an historic synod at Dordrecht in Holland, not as observers but as full participants. Lord Falkland of Great Tew, speaking in the Long Parliament, thought it a shocking thing that Archbishop Laud should have perpetrated an evident breach of 'that union which was formerly between us and those of our religion beyond the sea.' In the future, perspectives would alter with theological fashion. The eighteenth century would reach out to the Lutherans and the Greeks. In the nineteenth century a party in the Church of England would feel a powerful affinity for the Church of Rome and a desire to be reunited with it. There was never a time when the whole Church of England was content with splendid isolation.

But it would be foolish to deny that that complex and prolonged constitutional and ecclesiastical revolution which we know as the English Reformation, with its diverse religious, social and cultural implications, made some difference to the relationship of church, state and nation, both in legal fact and in the perceptions of those Englishmen, in the long run to all but a small minority, who offered no resistance to these changes. The Royal Supremacy was something different from the traditional ius reformandi and patronage exercised in the Church by medieval monarchs. Although Henry VIII and his Protestant successors chose to remain within tolerable limits of orthodoxy in the forms of Christianity which they imposed on the Church, there were no legally enforceable constraints upon their powers in these respects. A Unitarian or Muslim monarch might be politically inconceivable in a sixteenth-century context but there was no law to prevent it. Later it was necessary to invent one to keep Roman Catholics off the throne.

Protestant idealists were themselves critical of a public state of affairs which turned Englishmen into religious 'neuters', 'cold statute Protestants', 'such as jump with the Queen's laws'. Cuius regio, eius religio. ('In a [prince's] country, the [prince's] religion'.) King worship was a distinct danger, Queen worship under Elizabeth still more so. Where the emotive religious symbol of the crucified Christ had once stood in parish churches, flanked by the Virgin Mary and St John, the eye was now drawn to the royal coat of arms A Puritan at Bury St Edmunds who defaced the Queen's arms with words from the Apocalypse 'Thou art neither hot nor cold.... therefore., I shall spew thee out of my mouth' was hanged for his pains.

The Great Bible, promulgated by the royal authority of Henry VIII depicted on its title page that monarch handing out bibles to his subjects lay and clerical who are responding with cries of 'Vivat Rex' and 'God Save the King' The intention was that much of the devotion and awe previously commanded by ecclesiastical potentates or inspired by religious symbols should now be directed towards God's only vicar on earth, the prince, who, according to William Tyndale, 'is, in this world, without law; and may at his lust do right or wrong, and shall give accounts but to God only'. Tyndale was here addressing the consciences of subjects in respect of their duties to rulers. But this was not to condone, still less to promote, tyranny. Turning (as it were) to the consciences of kings, Tyndale told them: 'The people are God's, not theirs'. Although the king was 'in the room of God and representeth God himself', he was also, like Christ, a servant who should seek nothing but his subjects' profit. The Tudors paid at least lip-service to this pious principle. Queen Elizabeth, whom some cultural historians see as quite literally taking the place of the Virgin Mary as an object of popular worship, was never tired of declaring that she took no pleasure in princely power and magnificence but only in the sacrificial service of her people, in which she had wasted away like 'a taper of true virgin wax,... that I might give light and comfort to those that live under me'

The concept of Tudor despotism is in many ways inept. The powerful religious reinforcement of monarchy which derived from the Henrician Reformation and was its principal motive stiffened all forms of authority (except that of prelates!) and tended to moralise all political relationships within the structure of an increasingly orderly and law-abiding society. The Prayer Book, the chief legacy of Edward VI's reign to English civilisation, backed up by parliamentary acts of uniformity, was a further inducement to a kind of national solidarity. Later Anglicans would take comfort from the fact that at eight minutes past eleven on a Sunday morning one could be confident that everyone, everywhere, was engaged in the singing of the Venite. Whatever that was, it was not exactly despotism.

So it is likely that the Royal Supremacy contributed, directly or indirectly, to a more pronounced and efflorescent national consciousness, which expressed itself in the enjoyment of a monarchy supposedly enlightened, public-spirited and, above all, godly: 'Tudor propaganda' no doubt, but propaganda would not be propaganda if it did not have its consumers as well as its producers, and producers tend to become consumers, believing what they themselves have projected. The enhancement of monarchy within a deliberately contrived Protestant ideology of divinely ordained terrestrial order in itself forced on a sense of nationhood, expressed in religious terms. Richard Hooker wrote: 'By the goodness of Almighty God and his servant Elizabeth we are'.

Under Elizabeth this sentiment was further aroused by the belief of many Protestant Englishmen that their nation and queen were engaged in a war, no ordinary conflict but a cosmic struggle which had been engaged long before formal hostilities with Spain began in the mid-1580s. Sir Humphrey Gilbert took it for granted, and as early as 1578, that 'the Queen's Majesty is the chief head of the Church of Christ [he meant everywhere and not only in England, no narrow nationalism here!] and so an enemy to the Church of Rome, whereby it is certain that the King of Spain, with all those of his affinity, must needs be enemies to the Queen's Majesty and the realm of England'.

To some extent, a limited extent, this analysis was consistent with the drift and movement of events in the real political world. But it seems to have owed much more to an intellectual and emotional need to pit oneself and one's conception of justice and order against a foe which assumed forms which were perfectly and fully antithetical. Few doubted that the pope and his agents represented this antithesis of godly order, Antichrist. If we are to believe much of what he wrote, Sir Francis Walsingham participated in this almost paranoiac obsession and made it the guiding principle of mid-Elizabethan foreign policy. Hence the passion with which the Speaker of the House of Commons addressed the Queen in 1601:

Enjoying you, we enjoy all... God hath placed you by Himself, and therefore let the hand of who will fight against you, they have not prevailed, they shall not prevail!

But what about the 'we' in whose names Richard Hooker and the Speaker, Mr Recorder Croke, uttered? What of the nation? Evidently there was more to the religious realisation of English nationhood than the experience of monarchy, even 'godly' monarchy of the post-Henrician pattern: witness the emotional strength with which the martyrologist John Foxe wrote of 'this my-country Church of England', echoing Shakespeare's 'this England'. As a religious force, making its way and bringing about ultimately profound changes in mental attitudes and habits, the Reformation was almost equivalent to the discovery by the English people, or by a considerable portion of them, of the Bible as an all-sufficient source of inspiration, guidance and authority: the Bible in familiar language and read with little sense of anachronism as if it could apply, virtually without transposition or adaptation, to their own condition.

The principle of reading the Bible 'throughly' meant that Old Testament history became as familiar as the Gospels, and more readily applicable to the public, even political experience and purposes of the nationa as a whole. For the Old Testament is the record of the dealings of a people with its God, and much more of God with his people. No-one who has read even a sample of Elizabethan or Jacobean sermons can doubt that ancient Israel was a compelling paradigm, a model of nationhood with which Protestant England could not fail to identify itself. Was 'little England', a vineyard or garden of cucumbers, threatened by vastly superior forces? So, typically, was Israel of old. But 'if God be for us, who can be against us?' When disaster struck the people of the Bible, there was always a moral and religious reason, to be located in some form of national apostacy. So it would be, and had been, with England. The Marian reversal was no accident. If God allowed Jerusalem to be laid desolate, why should he spare London, where sin abounded? Religious defection, followed by the inevitable judgment and exile reduced the people of a God to a small but faithful remnant with a redemptive role for the whole nation which the prophet Isaiah envisaged. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. So the English Puritans reasoned.

A good example of Old Testament discourse in action is provided by the reaction of preachers and pamphleteers to the earthquake, severe by North-West Euroepan standards, which struck South-East England on April 6th, 1580. According to the Elizabethan media, which is all that we have to go on in observing public reactions, this was a 'most strange and terrible work of the Lord'. 'It cannot be without the special finger of God.' Not only preachers but Arthur Golding, a successful man of letters, was sure that what God intended in this fearful message was a warning to England 'which hath most abundantly tasted of God's mercy'. James Bisse, preaching in the very London church in which the earthquake had killed two children, declared that England was a fig tree which after almost twenty-three yeras of Elizabeth's blessed government still bore all too little fruit:

Our Saviour Jesus, if he were here, should be moved to weep over England as he wept over Jerusalem, and say, 0 England, England, if thou hadst even known at the least in this thy day those things which belong unto thy peace... Had not the Lord reserved a remnant amongst us... England should have been, not like a cottage in a vineyard, not like a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, but should have been as Sodom and like unto Gomorrah.

At the great preaching place of Paul's Cross Bisse insisted that 'England hath received much: therefore of England much shall be required'. Was the Lord likely to be more tolerant of England than of his very own Israel? If Jerusalem had not escaped, why should London? 'God hath not dealt so with any nation.' Only look at her sisters, France, Flanders and others, who had drunk deep of a bitter cup which England had been spared.

These examples of pulpit rhetoric serve to make the important point that the notion that England was a special case – 'God hath not dealt so with any nation' – was not necessarily triumphalist but more typically a message of critical self-castigation. It was as the nation was called upon to repent that it was made most conscious of its identity, at least by the voice of religion. Later, the Puritan preacher Thomas Hooker whose historic destiny it was to be to found the colony of Connecticut, shared with the last English congregation which he ever addressed a message from God: 'I will deal plainly with you. As sure as God is God, God is going from England'. 'England hath been a mirror of mercies. Yet now God may leave it, and make it a mirror of his justice.' 'Are we better than our brethren and neighbour nations, that have drunk so deeply of God's wrath?' It is true that in 1.641 the poet Milton cherished a sense of what he called England's 'precedencie' in restoring 'buried truth'. But writing in the immediate aftermath of the Laudian reaction he turned this conviction into bitter reproaches. 'How should it come to pass that England having had this grace and honour from God to be the first... should now be the last?' 'We are no better than a schism from all the Reformation.'

Milton's vision of England's historic destiny in initiating the Reformation, with all the great reformers 'lighting their tapers' from John Wyclif, derived from his reading of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments of the Church, popularly known as 'Foxe's Book of Martyrs'. This was a book which Milton's generation read with no less thoroughness than the Bible itself, 'a book of credit, next to the Book of God', according to one Jacobean writer. It was read at sea, on Drake's Golden Hind, in the ante-rooms of government offices, in Nicholas Ferrar's quasi-monastic household at Little Gidding. Ignatius Jordan, the fiercely religious city boss of Jacobean Exeter, had read it seven times over, the Bible twenty times over. For the Book of Martyrs was twice as long as the Bible, more than two million words, an account of what had happened since, which carried the story up to the very time in which it was written and read.

For Foxe, Wyclif was not the only 'candle' illuminating the dark corners of Christian history who could claim to belong to 'this my-country Church of England'. 'Gildas our countryman' testified to the antiquity of the faith in England, since it had been brought in the days of the Apostles by Joseph of Arimathea. The Emperor Constantine, who had brought peace to the Church, was an honorary Englishman, since he was the son (or so Foxe supposed) of a British princess and had won the Empire with British arms. Queen Elizabeth was virtually Constantine reincarnate.

According to the late William Haller, in a study of Foxe to which he wished to give the title The Elect Nation (in fact published in 1963 as Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation) the effect on readers of this monumental account of Christian history was to make them believe in England's special and manifest destiny. Protestantism was 'the cause of the national state', 'the religion of the Word in English', which gave depth and range to a sense of being 'a people with an identity of their own distinct from any other'. 'England was tn lead the world to its redemption in the final reformation of the Church and Elizabeth was to be the ruler and representative of England in that work.' Foxe's contemporary, Bishop Aylmer, described the Reformation as 'Christ's second coming in England'.

Stirring words and phrases with which to approach the end of an article celebrating the Tudors and depicting 'the face of an English Church'! For all that we know, a reading of Foxe could have had the effect of strengthening those chauvinistic attitudes parodied by George Bernard Shaw in St Joan, whose interrogator assumed that the Maid's 'voices' must have communicated with her in English. But it has been more recently shown that Haller's somewhat secularised version of Foxe's argument falsifies his intentions and misrepresents his conception of how a kingdom like England related to the wider kingdom and Church of Christ. To return to a distinction made earlier, there is no doubt that for Foxe England was an elect nation, not the Elect Nation. Indeed, in his very last, massive work, a Latin commentary on the last book of the Bible called Eicasmi seu meditationes in sacram Apocalypsin (1587), Foxe explicitly denied that God had elected one nation or church above any other.

Writing of the triumph of the English Reformation in the old Cambridge Modern History, F.W. Maitland took up a splendid and broad view of what was 'in the making': 'a new nation, a British nation'. 'The creed of unborn millions in undiscovered lands [America, Australia] was being decided.' Evidently 'the face of an English Church' was a face to launch a thousand ships. But Foxe had no such vision, no such expectations. In common with many, perhaps most of his religious contemporaries who thought about such things, he had a conventional expectation that the world would end and that Christ would gather in his universal Church, quite soon, and probably within his own lifetime. As Bishop Jewel wrote: 'We which shall see all these things shall also be caught up ourselves'.