Chapter 12
In This Chapter
● Understanding the role of the Catholic Church and the impact of the Reformation on Britain
● Getting to know the reformers: Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox
● Breaking with Rome: By Henry VIII
● See-sawing between Churches in England
● Picking Protestantism in Scotland
To modern eyes, the sixteenth century can seem obsessed with religion. People agonised over what would happen to them after they died, whether or not they should read the Bible - and if so, in what language - what happens at Communion, what priests should wear and whether they ought to marry, and a whole host of other things. If all this religious angst sounds a bit like worrying about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, remember this: Some of these people died for their faith, and they were prepared to kill for it, too. Religion was central to the politics, not just of the Tudor period, but of the Stuart period which followed it. In fact you can see religion playing an important part in public life in Britain all the way up to the Victorians and beyond. This chapter explains how not one, but at least two, Protestant churches appeared in Britain, how some people stuck to the Catholic faith, and the terrible things people can do if they think God wants them to.
Religion in the Middle Ages
If you’re going to have any hope of understanding what happened to religion in Britain during the Reformation, you’ve got to first understand religion in the Middle Ages. (You may find it useful to have a look at Figure 12-1 here, but stick to the Catholic part of it for the moment.)
Figure 12-1: Catholic and Protestant theology
The role of the Catholic Church
The Catholic Church always claimed that it had been founded by Jesus Christ himself, and that St Peter was its first head. From small beginnings, Catholicism had grown by the Middle Ages into a huge international organisation based in Rome and headed by the Pope. The popes saw themselves almost as successors to the Roman emperors, and in terms of the extent of their power and influence they were.
At the top of the Church was the Pope. The Pope was a senior churchman elected in a secret meeting by other senior churchmen known as cardinals.
(The theory was that the Holy Spirit guided the cardinals’ choice, but in reality it was guided by hard-nosed power politics.) The Pope had enormous authority: He could make pronouncements about Catholic belief and doctrine, he could appoint (and sack) bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, and he could excommunicate - throw out of the Church altogether - absolutely anyone, even the most mighty king or emperor. He could even impose an interdict - a sort of mass excommunication - on a whole country. (England had received an interdict once; see Chapter 8 for details.)
The Pope was also the head of a large central Italian state, and popes were up to their necks in all the usual political skullduggery and fighting just like any other rulers. They led armies into battle and fathered children, and then appointed them to top jobs. Pope Leo X, who was elected in 1513, decided to remodel the Vatican as a fantastic, luxurious palace for himself. Raising the funds for it, however, led - somewhat unexpectedly - to the Reformation.
Bishops, archbishops, and cardinals were senior churchmen appointed by the Pope to help run the Church. Because they were usually highly educated, kings and emperors also appointed them to high offices of state, which is why medieval monarchs were so keen to have a say in how bishops got appointed. A huge battle raged over the appointment of bishops - it was one of the reasons for the quarrel between Henry II and Thomas a Becket (see Chapter 8 for more info on this). Some churchmen even claimed that the Pope had the right to decide who could and could not be king. For this reason, the Pope backed William the Conqueror against King Harold in 1066 (discussed in Chapter 7), and in 1570 Pope Pius V felt he had the right to excommunicate Queen Elizabeth I and invite Catholics to overthrow her (see the section ‘The Catholics strike back and strike out’ for more about this. You might also like to look back at Chapter 11).
At grass-roots level were the ordinary priests who said Mass and heard confessions for ordinary folk in the local parish church. But even they had great power and influence. Priests were often the only people in the community who could read and write, and they could issue a stern penance - a punishment or act of atonement for sin - on any wrongdoers. The people of the parish had to give the Church a tenth, or a tithe, of anything they earned or produced, and the Church had to build some massive tithe barns to store it all. Priests were meant to lead lives of humility, poverty, and especially chastity. Some did, but a lot didn’t.
In addition, the Church ran all the schools and universities, all the hospitals and hospices, it had its own courts and its own codes of law, and it could force the civil authorities to impose punishments - even capital punishment - on anyone who stood up to it. All in all, you didn’t cross the medieval Church if you could avoid it.
Getting saved the Cathode Way
Medieval people put up with this powerful Church because it seemed to be the only thing that could save them from eternal torment. According to the Catholic Church, once you died, you went through a selection process in Purgatory before the recording angel decided whether you went to Heaven or Hell. Purgatory wasn’t some sort of celestial doctor’s waiting room: It was where you got your sin burnt away. The more sin you had, the longer you spent in Purgatory, and woe betide you if you still had some of those deep-down stains when Judgement Day came. (If this process sounds tricky, have a look at Figure 12-1.)
How could you keep your time in Purgatory to a minimum? Ideally, lead a blameless life, but only saints manage that. Alternatively, you could do things that would earn you time off for good behaviour (or grace to give this notion its proper title) and the Catholic Church had a whole set of suggestions:
● Go to Mass on Sundays: The Mass was (and still is) the most important ceremony in the Catholic Church. Central to Mass is the Eucharist, also known as Holy Communion. This is where the priest offers up bread and wine and, according to the theory, they become the actual body and blood of Christ. He then gives the bread to the people to eat (see the later section on ‘Bread, wine - and trouble’ to see why they didn’t get the wine). If you didn’t receive the bread, the Church said, you would never get to heaven.
● Pray to a saint: Doing this was fairly easy - statues of saints were available in every church to help you - but some saints had more clout than others. Best of all was praying over a saint’s relic - you know, St Andrew’s toenail or a feather from the Angel Gabriel.
● Do a good deed: The better the deed, the more Grace you racked up.
● Go on a pilgrimage: How much Grace this earned you depended on where you went. Travelling to a major shrine, like the one of St Thomas at Canterbury or the famous one of St James at Compostella in Spain, carried serious Grace.
● Go on a Crusade: At this rate, you may only be in Purgatory for the weekend. If you had the good fortune to die on a Crusade, you got to bypass Purgatory altogether and proceeded straight to Heaven.
● Get an indulgence: An indulgence was a Get Out of Purgatory Free card, issued directly by the Pope.
Crusades were over by the sixteenth century, so to bypass Purgatory altogether, you needed an indulgence. Normally you had to do something to earn it, but a Dominican friar called John Tetzel had just appeared in Germany selling indulgences. For cash. And not just for you, madam. These New Improved Papal Indulgences work for people who are already in Purgatory! As Tetzel put it: ‘Put a penny in the plate; a soul springs through that Pearly Gate!’
Enter the reformers
Previous churchmen had protested against the wealth and corruption in the church, like John Wyclif and the Lollards (see Chapter 10 to find out more), and a Bohemian reformer called Jan Hus, but the precedents weren’t encouraging. Hus had been burnt at the stake.
Martin Luther in Germany
Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a Catholic monk who didn’t believe that you could just buy your way into Heaven. If only some wayward priest was selling indulgences, Luther might not have been so dismayed. The real trouble was that Tetzel wasn’t working on his own. He had the Pope’s backing (the money was for Pope Leo X’s St Peter’s Restoration-in-the-Latest-Renaissance-Style fund). If Luther was right, and you couldn’t buy your way into Heaven, that meant the Pope was wrong. So Luther sat up late into the night in the tower of his Augustinian monastery trying to work this puzzle out. If the Pope was wrong about Salvation, then who on earth was right? What Luther came up with out of his agonising would turn Europe upside down:
● You don’t need to do anything to get to Heaven: You just have to believe in Jesus.
● You don’t need to go on pilgrimages or pray to saints (including the Virgin Mary): Everything you need is in the Bible. (Luther thought letting ordinary people read the Bible for themselves was a good idea.)
Priests (and that includes the Pope) don’t have special powers: They can’t change water into wine - or bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. And while we’re at it, nothing exists in the Bible to say priests can’t get married if they feel like it, either.
Luther’s ideas got him into serious trouble. Without the intervention of his local prince, he would’ve been put to death by order of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor (who wasn’t Holy or Roman but was Emperor of Germany). Some German princes who were on Luther’s side protested against the way the emperor was attacking Luther’s supporters, and so they all became known as Protestants.
John Calvin in Geneva
Important events were also happening in Switzerland. A French lawyer called John Calvin (1509-64) had been appointed minister of the city church at Geneva, and he was coming up with some very interesting new ideas about how to get to Heaven. ‘It’s easy,’ he said. ‘Some people are predestined to go to Heaven, even before they are born, and some people are predestined to go to Hell. The lucky ones are the Elect, and the unlucky ones are Suckers. If you’re very strict with yourself, pray lots, read the Bible every day, and generally have no fun, then that’s a pretty good sign that you’re one of the Elect; but if you drink or gamble, then you are Damned.’ (See Figure 12-1 to get an idea of how Calvin’s ideas worked out.)
Here are John Calvin’s rules for How to Run a Church:
● Each congregation elects its own ministers. No priests with special powers.
● No bishops in silly hats. Ministers elect a group of Elders to run the church. (However, Elders may also wear silly hats.)
● Ministers wear a simple black gown to preach in. No, repeat no, fancy vestments.
● Pictures, candlesticks, altar rails, statues, and stained-glass windows are evil and should be smashed. Whitewash those walls.
● No special altars. Just a plain communion table for the bread and wine.
A very important postscript exists: Calvin’s followers worked out an idea which they called the Doctrine of Resistance, which said that, if you had an ‘ungodly’ monarch (‘ungodly’ means ‘disagrees with Calvin’), you had the right - nay, the duty - to resist him. Or her. Even, if necessary, to kill him. Or her. This idea didn’t go down well with European monarchs - Catholic or Protestant!
John Knox
John Knox (1514-72) was a remarkable man. He, like Luther, started out as a Catholic priest, but he changed his mind when he met George Wishart, a Scottish Reformation leader, and he was deeply shocked when Scottish Cardinal Beaton (the Archbishop of St Andrews) had Wishart burnt at the stake. Knox thought it only fair when Cardinal Beaton got murdered later by an angry group of Scottish Protestant lords (see the section ‘Scotland Chooses Its Path’ for more info on the Reformation in Scotland): ‘These things we write merrily!’ Knox wrote.
When the Catholic French attacked St Andrews, Knox ended up as a prisoner in the French galleys, until Edward VI (Henry VIII’s son) got him released. But Knox had to hot-foot it for Geneva when Mary, Henry’s Catholic daughter, came to the throne. In Geneva, Knox was wowed by John Calvin (see the preceding section) and started spreading Calvin’s word among English exiles in Germany. He also wrote a famous pamphlet against women rulers, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment (that is, Rule) of Women. Bad timing. Knox was writing about Mary Tudor and Mary of Guise, but the pamphlet appeared just when Elizabeth became Queen of England. Knox sent her a grovelling letter saying, ‘Of course I didn’t mean you, Your Majesty . . .’. Elizabeth wasn’t convinced.
Back home in Scotland, Knox also met Mary, Queen of Scots - five times. He didn’t stand on ceremony; he lectured her the same way he would anyone else. He called her a slave of Satan and compared her to wicked Queen Jezebel in the Bible, meaning Scots should resist her before she dragged the whole country down to Hell. When Mary’s husband Darnley was murdered at Kirk o’ Fields and Mary married the chief suspect (see Chapter 11 for the details of those events), Knox said he wasn’t surprised and he thought that she should be executed. He didn’t live to see Mary’s death, however. He died in 1572. You can bet he wasn’t expecting to bump into Mary in the afterlife.
Back in England with Henry VIII
Henry VIII took a deep interest in theology, and he couldn’t stand Martin Luther. He even wrote a book pointing out exactly where he thought Luther had got his faith wrong. The Pope was so pleased that he gave Henry a special title, Fidei Defensor - ‘Defender of the Faith’. You can still see the letters FD on British coins today. Yet despite Henry’s book and feelings about Luther, English scholars were getting interested in Luther’s ideas, and his books were beginning to find their way into Oxford and Cambridge, where the next generation of priests were being taught.
Henry’s problems with the Pope weren’t about theology; they were about what was termed The King’s Great Matter. Henry wanted the Pope to give him a divorce from his queen, Katharine of Aragon, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn (see Chapter 11 to find out more about why Henry wanted rid of Katharine and why his other marriages didn’t turn out too well either). When the Pope wouldn’t play ball, Henry decided to break away from the Roman Church and set up an English Church, with himself at its head.
Breaking with Rome
At first, all Henry wanted was a Church that would give him his divorce. To get that Church, he needed to cut the Pope out of the picture. So he started in 1532 with a set of laws to stop anyone from appealing to Rome and to stop any orders from the Pope coming into England. The laws also laid down that all of Henry’s subjects had to take an oath accepting Henry as head of the Church. Some people objected. Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher of Rochester, for example, both refused to take the oath, and Henry had them both executed for it. The monks of the London Charterhouse also refused to take the oath, and Henry had them hanged, drawn, and quartered. Unsurprisingly, most people went along with him.
Henry then struck out at one of the most popular pilgrimage cults in England: The shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury. This saint was Thomas a Becket, the archbishop who had backed the Pope against King Henry II and become a martyr when King Henry’s men killed him in Canterbury Cathedral (see Chapter 8 if you want the details of that event). Slightly uncomfortable parallels for Henry VIII, wouldn’t you say? So Henry had the shrine destroyed, and told everyone to do the same to any pictures or statues of St Thomas they may have.
Closing the monasteries
By 1536 Henry VIII was low on cash, and Thomas Cromwell, a Protestant and Henry’s chief minister, had an idea for getting some: Close down all the monasteries. Monks were meant to be poor, but their monasteries sat on huge sums, some of it in land and some of it in treasures like gold and silver chalices. Henry’s eyes lit up. But they couldn’t just close the monasteries like that, so Cromwell sent his men out to investigate them and dig for dirt - which they duly delivered.
According to Cromwell’s men, you could hardly move in the cloisters for bags of gold and monks ravishing maidens. This information was good tabloid stuff, just what Cromwell needed to give the orders to shut the places down and turn the monks out into the world to go and earn an honest living. His men even stripped the lead from the roofs, which is why to this day you can see those stark but beautiful ruins of great abbeys at Fountains and Riveaulx and Tintern in the green of the English and Welsh countryside. Closing the monasteries down provoked the most serious challenge Henry had to face in the whole of his reign: The Pilgrimage of Grace.
The Pilgrimage of Grace
Don’t be misled by this name. The Pilgrimage of Grace was an armed rebellion, the biggest and most serious that Tudor England ever faced. The rebellion started in Lincolnshire and then spread to Yorkshire, where a local landowner called Robert Aske became its leader. The rebels were angry about lots of things: They didn’t like the new taxes Henry had introduced, and they didn’t like it when local lords enclosed the common land (see Chapter 14 for more about what the problem with enclosures was all about).
But above all, the rebels hated what Thomas Cromwell was doing to the Church. They wanted Cromwell out and their monasteries back, and they thought Henry would listen. Yes, it was a bit naive.
The Pilgrims had a great banner showing the five wounds of Christ (the ones inflicted on the cross), and they said prayers and sang hymns as they went.
Henry sent an army north under the Duke of Norfolk to confront the rebels, but when the Duke got there he found he didn’t have enough men. So he stalled. He told the Pilgrims that if they all went home, the king would pardon them and give them what they wanted. The poor saps believed him. Norfolk got a few more men together and then struck. Dawn raids. Aske and some 250 of the Pilgrims were strung up on city walls and on village greens to show what happened if you dared so much as raise your little finger against King Henry VIII.
The Church of England: More Protestant or More Catholic?
So what sort of a Church was Henry’s new Church of England going to be?
That was the big question, and even Henry didn’t seem to be all that sure.
Swinging toward Protestant ideas...
Henry got rid of the Pope, banned pilgrimages, and ordered pictures and statues of saints to be destroyed. He closed down monasteries. Most importantly, he agreed to publish an English Bible. If you’ve been reading this chapter from the beginning, this idea may sound slightly familiar. By Henry’s actions, he seemed to be doing just what Martin Luther had said everyone ought to be doing.
So was Henry VIII’s Church going to be Protestant? Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, was a Protestant, as Anne Boleyn had been and Anne of Cleves (Henry’s current wife by 1536) was. When Henry issued the Ten Articles, which explained what his Church believed in, he appeared to be Protestant, too. And then, quite suddenly, he seemed to change his mind.
Translation troubles
You wouldn't think just translating the Bible into English would cause much trouble, but you'd be wrong. The Catholic Church, which didn't approve of ordinary people reading the Bible anyway - it wanted to keep that to priests - had been using a Latin translation called the Vulgate, until Erasmus, a top Renaissance scholar, found it was full of mistakes - a point that didn't go down well in the Vatican, I can tell you! William Tyndale came up with a New Testament in English that anyone could read, but he got into trouble with Henry VIII for doing it (this was in Henry's I-hate-Luther days) and he had to flee abroad, and even then the Dutch put him to death at Henry VIII's request. 'Oh Lord!' Tyndale is supposed to have said, 'Open the King of England's eyes!' Maybe he did, because when Miles Coverdale produced a full English
Bible a few years later it became Henry's 'official' Bible, distributed to every parish. It even had a cover picture of Henry VIII giving the Word of God to his people. When Henry's Catholic daughter, Mary, came to the throne, English Protestants headed for Geneva where they produced their own Geneva Bible (also known as the 'Breeches Bible' because it said Adam and Eve got hold of fig leaves and made themselves breeches, which would suggest they had sewing machines in the Garden of Eden!). Soon a rival Catholic English Bible was produced, too! In the end it was King James I who got all the scholars together to produce the definitive Authorised Version, or King James Bible, which was so beautifully written even Catholics couldn't really complain.
Swinging back toward Cathode ideas...
When Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves fell apart (see Chapter 11 to find out why), it turned him off both Thomas Cromwell and his German Protestant friends. When the bishops came up with a book (called - not very imaginatively - The Bishops’ Book) with all sorts of ideas for making the Church of England Protestant, Henry didn’t like it one bit. Henry even had second thoughts about people reading the Bible. He stopped giving out copies and told people to leave Bible-reading to priests. Finally, in 1539, Henry got Parliament to pass the Act of Six Articles to say exactly what this Church of England believed in:
● Transubstantiation: The bread and wine change into the body and blood of Christ when the priest says the words.
● People should only receive the bread at Communion, not the wine: This was very much a Catholic idea.
● Priests should not marry because God says so: Another Catholic idea.
● Private Masses (ones people paid for, often for the sake of souls in purgatory) were okay: Which was not at all what Protestants thought.
● Widows may not remarry: Henry was supporting (Catholic-style) vows of celibacy.
● Everyone needs to go to Confession: And the penalty for denying this? Death!
A word exists for what Henry was doing, and the word wasn’t Protestant. A lot of English Protestants got out while they still could and headed for Geneva. Once there, it was just a question of waiting - for Henry VIII to die.
God's on Our Side! - the Protestants and Edward VI
English Protestants were very relieved when Edward VI came to the throne in 1547. Although he was only nine, he had been taught all about the Protestant religion. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was becoming more Protestant, too. He got married, for a start, and he banned statues and pictures of saints or the Virgin Mary. But during Edward’s reign a more important question needed tackling: Did the bread and wine at Mass really become Jesus’s body and blood or not?
Bread, wine - and trouble
The question of what happened to the bread and wine was crucial. The Catholic Church said that the moment the priest spoke the words ‘This is my body, this is my blood’ the bread and wine became the actual body and blood of Christ. This idea was called Transubstantiation. Luther more or less went along with that idea, though he thought they became a sort of mixture of bread-and-body and wine-and-blood, which got called Consubstantiation. But Calvin rejected the whole idea because it made it look as if priests had special magic powers. So Protestants held that the bread and wine remained bread and wine, and you took them in memory of the Last Supper, and nothing more.
One extra point existed. Because the Catholic Church believed the wine became Jesus’s blood, it was absolutely vital not to spill it, so to be on the safe side only the priest drank the wine - everyone else had to make do with the bread. In time the Catholic Church began to speak as if only its priests were allowed to drink the wine, and it became yet another thing for Protestants and Catholics to argue about.
So when Cranmer sat down to write the Book of Common Prayer or Prayer Book in 1549 (the actual words and liturgy that would replace the Catholic Mass in English churches), he had to be very careful in the bit about the bread and the wine. He fudged the details. Deliberately.
The text didn’t actually say that the bread is the body and the wine is the blood, but on the other hand it didn’t actually say that they’re not either. But Catholics weren’t having this ambiguity. As soon as the Prayer Books started appearing a huge Catholic uprising occurred in Devon and Cornwall that took a huge army to put down. (See Chapter 11 for the political consequences of this uprising.) Meanwhile Cranmer was having second thoughts. Protestant thoughts. So in 1552, he had another go at writing the book.
The message in the second round was clear: The bread is bread and the wine is wine and nothing else. But within a year, Edward VI died and his Catholic sister Mary was on the throne. No more prayer books or articles. The Mass was back, and so was the Pope.
We're on God's Side! - the Catholics and Queen Mary
Queen Mary has had some of the worst press in history. Okay, not as bad as Jack the Ripper, but not a lot better. For years historians said that Mary forced the English to become Catholic and burned hundreds of Protestants while she was at it, so she became known as Bloody Mary. They even named a cocktail after her.
Now historians reckon that most English people were quite happy being Catholic until well into Elizabeth’s reign. They didn’t like Henry VIII’s changes, and they hated the Prayer Book of 1552, though that only lasted a year. So when Mary came to the throne and restored the Catholic Church, a general sigh of relief was given.
A good beginning, then a few bad decisions
Mary had some very able bishops to help her, especially her new Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Pole. Pole wasn’t a jumped up butcher’s boy like Cardinal Wolsey (see Chapter 11), he was a proper toff, of royal blood. People took out their old Mass books and dug their holy statues out of the attic. Then Mary made some very silly decisions:
● Marrying King Philip II of Spain: It was bound to be unpopular, and it was.
● Burning Protestants: Not quite as unpopular as you may think - this was an age when you could be disembowelled in public, don’t forget. But people didn’t like it when the victim was poor or when groups of Protestants were burnt together.
● Going to war with France: Normally the English were only too happy to fight the French, but this time, they were only dragged into it to help Philip, and then Mary went and lost Calais. They never really forgave her.
Come on Mary, tight my five
Mary’s reign is best known for her policy of arresting Protestants and burning them at the stake.
Catholics and Protestants didn’t just think the other side was wrong, they actually thought they were evil and had to be stopped. But you also had a Christian duty to save them if you could. So, first Protestants had to Come Out (‘Hi. I’m Bob. And I’m an - an . . . Anglican.’). Then they had to repent. Finally, they had to be burnt because, through burning there was just a chance that the fire might purify their soul - the old Purgatory idea (see the section ‘Getting saved the Catholic way’). The most famous burnings took place in Oxford, when Thomas Cranmer (the one who had worked so hard on the Book of Common Prayer) was burnt, as well as Anglican bishops, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley.
Historians argue about what to make of the burnings. Some point out that Mary’s persecution was mild compared to persecution on the continent, which is probably true but wouldn’t have meant much to English people at the time. Others say that she turned many people against the Catholic Church. What historians do generally agree on is that Mary and Cardinal Pole, her Archbishop of Canterbury, were very successful in getting the Catholic Church up and running again. Had they lived a bit longer, England could very well have stayed a Catholic country. But they didn’t. They died the same day in 1558 and Elizabeth came to the throne. The Catholics had missed their chance.
Elizabeth Settles It... or Does She?
Religion was high up on Elizabeth’s list of priorities when she came to the throne. Luckily for her, all Queen Mary’s bishops resigned, so she could appoint new ones who would go along with what she wanted. And what she wanted was Protestant - with Catholic bits:
● Elizabeth was to be Supreme Governor of the Church, not Supreme Head like Henry VIII. Governor meant that the real head of the Church was God.
● Her Church of England was to have proper bishops, silly hats and all.
● Priests in her Church were to wear vestments. The vestment only needed to be a white cotton surplice worn over a black cassock, but it had to be worn. Elizabeth wanted her priests to look like priests.
● Some saints’ days and feast days could stay. Elizabeth knew a crowd-pleaser when she saw one.
● Thirty-nine articles summed up what the Church of England believed.
A lot of Calvin appears in the Articles - Article 17 is all about predestination - but a lot of Elizabeth’s in there, too. Article 21 stops the Church holding a Council without the monarch’s permission, and Article 35 stresses the authority of the queen and her magistrates.
● There would have to be another new prayer book. As for the thorny problem of the bread and wine (see the earlier sections ‘God’s on Our Side! - the Protestants and Edward VI’ and ‘Bread, wine - and trouble’ for details on this dilemma), they came up with a very clever solution phrasing the text in such a way as to imply that the bread and wine both are and aren’t the body and blood of Christ.
That last point’s called having it both ways, my friends! But if Elizabeth thought her settlement was going to win everyone over, she could think again.
The Catholics strike back and strike out
In 1570 Pope Paul V excommunicated Elizabeth, which meant Catholics were allowed to plot against her. (He also started sending Catholic missionary priests into England.) Elizabeth responded:
She made it treason even to bring a copy of the excommunication bull into England.
Harbouring a Catholic priest was made illegal. Catholics had to hide the priests in secret priest holes.
Catholics who refused to take communion at their local Anglican church paid a hefty recusancy fine.
The Puritans
Puritan is a tricky word. We tend to think of Puritans as wearing large white collars and tall black hats, but only the really serious ones did that. Strictly speaking, no one group called Puritans existed: The term was one of abuse used against Protestants who criticised the Church of England. Some were out-and-out
Calvinists, who wanted to get rid of bishops and parishes, and even the queen, but most just wanted to change some of the most Catholic features of her Church, like vestments or decoration in church buildings. Either way, they saw themselves as normal Protestants and everyone else as the oddballs who had got things wrong.
By 1580 recusancy fines had gone through the roof, and Catholics could go to prison just for attending Mass. Imprisoned Catholics had to answer the Bloody Questions, like ‘Do you obey the Pope?’ and ‘So if the Pope told you to kill the Queen, would you do it?’ To even be a Catholic priest was treason, and in 1580, the government set up a huge manhunt to catch the first Jesuit missionaries. (Jesuits were members of the elite Catholic order the Society of Jesus.) Jesuit priest Edmund Campion and two others were caught in a secret hideaway. Campion was tortured and executed.
And the Protestants aren't happy either
English Protestants weren’t any happier with the Church of England than English Catholics were. In fact, they thought the Church of England was too Catholic, with its vestments and bishops and candles and what have you.
Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, refused to wear vestments or tell his priests to wear them, so Elizabeth suspended him (from office, not from the window). Some Protestants gathered in small illegal prayer groups called prophesyings, where they could elect their ministers and wear plain black, just as Calvin had said they should. For Elizabeth, the religious issue was a question of authority. She was Supreme Governor of the Church; she had laid down the law. Elizabeth had these Puritans, as she called them, arrested and executed.
Scotland Chooses Its Path
While Henry VIII was deciding what religion he wanted for the Church of England, in Scotland Cardinal David Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews, knew exactly what he wanted, and it wasn’t Protestants. He hunted Scottish Protestants down mercilessly and burned them at the stake.
Protestant uprising
In 1545 Cardinal Beaton arrested and burned a very popular Scottish Protestant preacher called George Wishart; Wishart’s death was the final straw for the beleaguered Scottish Protestants. A group of Protestant lords burst Beaton’s door down and hacked him to pieces. But they had reckoned without the French.
The French had virtually been ruling Scotland ever since James V died and handed over to his baby daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots (see Chapter 11 for the low-down on this). The Regent was James V’s ultra-Catholic widow, Mary of Guise. The Scots quickly got tired of being ruled by Mary of Guise, especially as more of them became Protestant, while their French rulers remained staunchly Catholic.
Mary of Guise wasn’t going to sit around and see cardinals being murdered. She got her troops together and marched to St Andrews. The Protestants had to surrender, and the French put the prisoners, including one John Knox, in their galleys as slaves.
The Protestant lords weren’t quelled, though. A group of them, calling themselves the Lords of the Congregation, signed a covenant rejecting the Pope and all he stood for and dared the French to do their worst. Then John Knox (who’d been freed from galley duty by Edward VI) arrived back in Scotland from Geneva where he’d been lapping up Calvin’s ideas. He became minister of St Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh and immediately started stirring up trouble for the French. The Lords of the Congregation forced Mary of Guise to step down as Regent, and in 1560, Scotland formally broke away from the Catholic Church. And that situation was how things stood when Mary, Queen of Scots came home from France (to find out what she was doing in France and what happened when she returned to Scotland, see Chapter 11).
Mary's return to Scotland
Mary, Queen of Scots was a Catholic and proud of it, but she knew she could not hope to defeat Knox and the Lords of the Congregation. She sided with the Protestants - if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em - and, when a Catholic rising occurred, she crushed it. Her efforts didn’t help her much, however: The Protestants still turned against her after all that business with Lord Darnley and Lord Bothwell (see Chapter 11 for details) and forced her to abdicate.
James VI steps in and muddies the Waters even more
With Mary gone, her baby son, James VI, became Scotland’s king. Soon Scotland’s religion was looking even more confused than England’s:
● The Church of Scotland (known as the Kirk) was strictly Calvinist, or Presbyterian as they called it (after presbyter, a good biblical name for a priest). It had elected ministers, who all wore plain black gowns and long beards, and elected the General Assembly to run the whole thing.
● Scotland also had lots of Scottish Catholics, especially in the Highlands.
They were on Mary, Queen of Scots’s side and wanted her back.
● In 1584 the Edinburgh Parliament made King James Head of the Kirk.
According to Calvin’s rules, however, you couldn’t have a monarch at the head of a church. And King James didn’t much like the Presbyterian Kirk anyway. He preferred having bishops (he could control them). He was certainly having no truck with that Calvinist Doctrine of Resistance, explained in the section ‘John Calvin in Geneva’ earlier in this chapter.
So Scotland was a Presbyterian country headed by a king who didn’t like Presbyterians. Tricky, eh? Made trickier by the fact that when James became King of England on Elizabeth’s death in 1603, he also became the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which Presbyterians said was virtually Catholic (although Catholics didn’t think so; see the earlier section ‘Elizabeth Settles It . . . or Does She?’ for the details). Handling all this religious politicking was going to take tact and intelligence. King James VI didn’t do tact or intelligence.